Posts Tagged ‘proggie’

Trip To Amsterdam (TTA)

Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009

Saint Nicolas Roman Catholic Church near Amsterdam trainstation pictureOn Tuesday Zlati (A friend of mine introduced to me by Father Veliko), came to Arnhem. The plan was that he came on Tuesday here and afterwards in Wednesday morning the Trip to Amsterdam was going to happen. First we had settled that he will be in Arnhem in 12:00 o’clock. So Around 10:50 I walked down the way to the trainstation. I was on my way when Zlati ringed and told that he still, haven’t catched the train and he is not going to make it for 12:00, though he will be on Arnhem Central Station in 04:35 in the afternoon. I came back to home and on my way bought some apples as well as a oily sweet thing from the Turkish shop “Sultan” 🙂

Around 3 I took my way to the city center again, on my way I had toleave Sali’s laptop in his home. I had taken his laptop to re-install Windows and setup his Windows in Bulgarian as well as configure it to be able to watch Bulgarian TV channels online.
In order to achieve that I used a proxy donated to me by Amridikon. Thanks Amri!

To make Windows Vista Home Premium to Bulgarian I had to use a small proggie “Vista Change Language 1.0”. I had to burn the program to a CD and boot into it and then use the downloaded language pack to change the vista text language to Bulgarian. I did so all went well, unfortunately after an upgrade the text in the menus did screw up. So I have to boot again in the Vista Change Language 1.0 boot CD and revert it back to Bulgarian.
Then I had to disable Windows Vista updates in order to prevent the same language mess up to occur again. This was a little out of the topic, but I decided it’s nice to have it on paper.

So back to where I was with my TTA .. I took Zlati from the train station,we went to Sali and he treated us with some kind of traditional turkish soup meal. The soup was quite nice btw. He was extremely happy that he could watch Bulgarian TV’s online through the bg.gledai.tv website. I was glad to that God helped me and blessed me in succeeding in all the things I mentioned above. Afterwards we went with Zlati and Koko to Albertheijn picked up a beer and a couple of other things. Then I and Zlati went to my place where we used my notebook to research about places of Interest, we would like to attend in Amsterdam. We went to bed around 2 o’clock at night.

At the morning we went to the train station. I suggested that we go a little earlier because I thought, well it might be better to be earlier in the city for to have more time to walk and take a look at its significant things in it. We were on the train station 8:10 and had the intention to take the first train at 8:29, however God had other plans for that.It seemed that we have to wait and buy a ticket for after 9:00, otherwise Zlati couldn’t use his train card for my discount.He was quite irritated by the fact that I suggested that we went to the train station so early since he was quite sleepy in the morning because we went to bed so late.

Anyways I got a coffee from the trainstation waiting-room coffee machine.And, eh the coffee there is expensive, be careful if you travel in the Netherlands by train.

The coffee costed 1.50 per cappuchino, huh … We catched a train in 9:29 and we were in the capital of Amsterdam in 10:40.
I was so excited! Yes the trip worthed the price of 16.30 EUR (with the 40% discount). Amsterdam is a really nice city, especially considering it’s architecture. And I saw such a big shops and so many things to choose from … The whole city is full of canals and boats are traveling through it.
We went to music store, wow there was so much music in it.
We entered a lot of Catholic Churches in one of the Catholic Churches there was an orthodox icon of St. Nickolas! So I made the sign of the cross and prayed the Saint to pray God for me the sinner.
With our arrival right after we went out of the central station I saw a bookstore,so I proposed Zlati to enter. It seemed that was a protestant Christian bookstore. Even though a protestant one the people there at least were believing in our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

I had a small chat with one of the guys asking if they have Orthodox Bible, It seemed they haven’t so I started telling him about the advantages of being Orthodox Christian. I explained him how I became orthodox after God gave me the faith and transformed my life.
The bookstore had a free/coffee and tea.So each me and Zlati took a cappuchino. It was so nice God gave me a hot drink in the Early morning in Amsterdam.
A lot of people are insane in that place, I saw a lot of pod smokers on the street.

On a lot of places the air had that typical pod stell. We saw a lot of Museums, we tried to use a citymap although in a lot of cases  un-succesful. We saw so many Churches, Madam Tusad’s museum,as well as Anne Frank museum, the tulip museum.
There was also sex, museums we saw on our way and even this freaks had gay museum. We saw some road building in progress where a couple of people were building a road on top of pillars, right above the water! 🙂 The city is full of old buildings most of which originating from 16th century. The Architecture is really amazing. The parks and everything and the terraces had that typical European style which I’ve seen in movies showing people from the 18thor 19th century drinking coffees on the balconies. We took a lot of pictures. Unfortunately I still haven’t taken the pictures from Zlati. We entered into a shop which was selling buddhist, hindu and indian statues and souvenirs to warm a bit as the weather outside was coldy.
There we had a nice chat with the storekeeper, about religion and about my Orthodox faith in Our Lord Jesus! He mentioned that near around there is an Syrian Orthodox Church. So went to seek for it. After some rambling we found it but unfortunately it was already closed the time was quite late over 18:00, so it was quite normal to be closed.The style of the Church didn’t really much differentiated from the rest of the Catholic Churches.

Earlier we went into a Church, whether they had that modern exposition, again we went their to warm ourselves (it was such a cold day).

The Church inside was nice but the pictures,they was selling on the expo was really terrible, a lot of sado-mazo and perverted motives in the pictures …

I was saddened to see that they have de-sacrated a holy place like that. Well it’s true that the Roman catholics stepped aside from the orthodox faith some time ago but still they are believing Christians and therefore there temples are holy to some degree too … therefore such an abomination really shouldn’t happen.

The good thing was that in the Church they even had made toilets inside the church we could use 🙂
The Church wall paintings were displaying the way our Lord Jesus has walked on it’s way to final execution by the jews, carrying his cross on the way to Golgotha.

Around 18:30 we went to the street where the so famous prostites and drug addicts street was the “RED LIGHTS” – so famous all around the world ….

I couldn’t believed my eyes, prostites staying behind windows half naked waiting for a customer to hire them for sex …I have heard about that place but I really couldn’t imagine it could legally exist in the center of a metropolitan city like Amsterdam.

We walked in that “wicked” part of the city for around hour.
There were all kind of junkies people who looked really criminal, the prostitutes on the windows. Sex shops, sex video rooms, you name it .. all the disgusting stuff you could imagine. After this walk we went to the train station around 8:00 and took the train back to Arnhem. The whole day went quite flawless,God has heard our prayer to keep us from evil and give us safe journey.The whole trip was really relaxing for me! Praise the Lord for his great mercy towards me the sinner for giving my eyes to see all this things!

Editting binary files in console and GUI on FreeBSD and Linux

Thursday, April 26th, 2012

I’ve recently wanted to edit one binary file because there was compiled in the binary a text string with a word I didn’t liked and therefore I wanted to delete. I know I can dig in the source of the proggie with grep and directly substitute my “unwatned text” there but I wanted to experiment, and see what kind of hex binary text editors are for Free OSes.
All those who lived the DOS OS computer era should certainly remember the DOS hex editors was very enjoyable. It was not rare case, where in this good old days, one could simply use the hex editor to “hack” the game and add extra player lives or modify some vital game parameter like put himself first in the top scores list. I even remember some DOS programs and games was possible to be cracked with a text editor … Well it was times, now back to current situation as a Free Software user for the last 12 years it was interesting to see what is the DOS hexeditor like alternatives for FreeBSD and Linux and hence in this article I will present my findings:

A quick search in FreeBSD ports tree and Debian installable packages list, I’ve found a number of programs allowing one to edit in console and GUI binary files.

Here is a list of the hex editors I will in short review in this article:

  • hexedit
  • dhex
  • chexedit
  • hte
  • hexer
  • hexcurse
  • ghex
  • shed
  • okteta
  • bless
  • lfhex

1. hexedit on Linux and BSD – basic hex editor

I’ve used hexedit already on Linux so I’ve used it some long time ago.

My previou experience in using hexedit is not too pinky, I found it difficult to use on Redhat and Debian Linux back in the day. hexedit is definitely not a choice of people who are not “initiated” with hex editting.
Anyways if you want to give it a try you can install it on FreeBSD with:

freebsd# cd /usr/ports/editors/hexedit
freebsd# make install clean

On Debian the hexedit, install package is named the same so installation is with apt:

debian:~# apt-get –yes install hexedit

hexedit screenshot Debian Linux Squeeze

2. Hex editting with chexedit

I’ve installed chexedit the usual way from ports:

freebsd# cd /usr/ports/editors/chexedit
freebsd# make install clean

chexedit is using the ncurses text console library, so the interface is very similar to midnight commander (mc) as you see from below’s screenshot:

Chexeditor FreeBSD 7.2 OS Screenshot

Editting the binary compiled in string was an easy task with chexedit as most of the commands are clearly visible, anyways changing a certain text string contained within the binary file with some other is not easy with chexedit as you need to know the corresponding binary binary value representing each text string character.
I’m not a low level programmer, so I don’t know the binary values of each keyboard character and hence my competence came to the point where I can substitute the text string I wanted with some unreadable characters by simply filling all my text string with AA AA AA AA values…

chexedit on Debian is packaged under a deb ncurses-hexedit. Hence to install it on Deb run:

debian:~# apt-get –yes install ncurses-hexedit

Further on the binary to run chexedit on binary contained within ncurses-hexedit is:

debian:~# hexeeditor

3. Hex Editting on BSD and Linux with hte

Just after trying out chexedit, I’ve found about the existence of one even more sophisticated hexeditor console program available across both FreeBSD and Linux.
The program is called hte (sounds to me a bit like the Indian word for Elephant “Hatti” :))

hte is installable on Debian with cmd:

debian:~# apt-get install ht

On FreeBSD the port name is identical, so to install it I execed:

freebsd# cd /usr/ports/editors/hte
freebsd# make install clean

hte is started on Debian Linux (and presumably other Linux distros) with:

$ hte

On FreeBSD you need to run it with ht command:

freebsd# ht

You see how hte looks like in below screenshot:

ht has the look & feel like midnight commander and I found it easier to use than chexedit and hexeditor
4. hexer VI like interface for Linux

As I was looking through the available packages ready to install, I’ve tried hexer

debian:~# apt-get install –yes hexer

hexer does follow the same standard commands like VIM, e.g. i for insert, a for append etc.

Hexer Debian Linux vim like binary editor screenshot

It was interesting to find out hexer was written by a Bulgarian fellow Petar Penchev 🙂
(Proud to be Bulgarian)

http://people.freebsd.org/~roam/ – Petar Penchev has his own page on FreeBSD.org

As a vim user I really liked the idea, the only thing I didn’t liked is there is no easy way to just substitute a string within the binary with another string.

5. hexcurse another ncurses library based hex editor

On Deb install and run via:

debian:~# apt-get –yes install hexcurse
debian:~# hexcurse /usr/bin/mc

Hexcurse Debian Linux text binary editor screenshot

hexcurse is also available on FreeBSD to install it use cmd:

freebsd# cd /usr/ports/editors/hexcurse
freebsd# make install clean
….

To access the editor functions press CTRL+the first letter of the word in the bottom menu, CTRL+H, CTRL+S etc.
Something I disliked about it is the program search is always in hex, so I cannot look for a text string within the binaries with it.

6. ghex – Editting binary files in graphical environment

If you’re running a graphical environment, take a look at ghex. ghex is a gnome (graphical hex) editor.Installing ghex on Debian is with:

debian:~# apt-get –yes install ghex
….

To run ghex from terminal type:

debian:~# ghex2

GHex2 GNOME hex binary editor screenshot

To install ghex on FreeBSD (and I assume other BSDs), install via port:

freebsd# cd /usr/ports/editors/ghex
freebsd# make install clean

Gnome hex editor have plenty of tools, useful for developers to debug binary files.

Some nice tools one can find are under the the menus:

Windows -> Character Table

This will show a complete list of each keyboard sent character in ASCII, Hex, Decimal, Octal and Binary

Screenshot ghex Character table Debian Linux

Another useful embedded tool in ghex is:

Windows -> Type Convertion Dialog

Ghex type convertion dialog screenshot

Note that if you want to use the Type Convertion Dialog tool to find the representing binary values of a text string you will have to type in the letters one by one and save the output within a text file and later you can go and use the same editor to edit the text string within the binary file you like.

I’m not a programmer but surely for programmers or people who want to learn some binary counting, this 2 ghex edmebbed tools are surely valuable.

To conclude even though there are plenty of softwares for hex editting in Linux and BSD, none of them is not so easy to use as the old DOS hexdedit tool, maybe it will be a nice idea if someone actually rewrites the DOS tool and they package it for various free operating systems, I’m sure many people will find it helpful to have a 1:1 equivalent to the DOS tool.

7. Shed pico like interfaced hex editor

For people, who use pico / nano as a default text editor in Linux shed will probably be the editor of choice as it follows the command shortcuts of picoOn Deb based distros to install it run:

debian:~# apt-get install –yes shed

shed pico like hex binary editor Linux

Shed has no BSD port as of time of writting.8. Okteta a KDE GUI hex editor

For KDE users, I found a program called okteta. It is available for Deb based Linuxes as deb to install it:

debian:~# apt-get –yes install okteta

Screenshot Okteta Debian GNU / Linux Squeeze

As of time of writting this article there is no okteta port for BSDs.
Okteta has plenty of functions and even has more of a functions than ghexedit. Something distinctive for it is it supports opening multiple files in tabs.

9. lfhex a large file text editor

lfhex is said to be a large (binary) file text editor, I have not tested it myself but just run it to see how it looks like. I don’t have a need to edit large binary files too, but I guess there are people with such requirements too 🙂

lfhex - Linux The Large file hex editor

To install lfhex on Debian:

debian:~# apt-get install –yes lfhex

lfhex has also a FreeBSD port installable via:

freebsd# cd /usr/ports/editors/lfhex
freebsd# make install clean

10. Bless a GUI tool for editting large hex (binary) files

Here is the description directly taken from the BSD port /usr/ports/editors/bless

Bless is a binary (hex) editor, a program that enables you to edit files asa sequence of bytes. It is written in C# and uses the Gtk# bindings for theGTK+ toolkit.

To install and use ot on deb based Linuxes:

debian:~# apt-get install –yes bless
….

On BSD installation is again from port:

freebsd# cd /usr/ports/editors/bless
freebsd# make install clean
….

Something that makes bless, maybe more desirable choice for GUI users than ghex is its availability of tabs. Opening multiple binaries in tabs will be useful only to few heavy debuggers.

Bless GUI hex editor Debian Linux tabs opened screenshot

11. Ghextris – an ultra hard hacker tetris game 🙂

For absolute, hacker / (geeks), there is a tetris game called ghextris. The game is the hardest tetris game I ever played in my life. It requires more than regular IQ and a lot of practice if you want to become really good in this game.

To enjoy it:

debian:~# apt-get –yes install ghextris

Ultra hrad hardcore hackers game ghextris screenshot

Unfortunately there is no native port of ghextris for BSD (yet). Anyhow, it can be probably run using the Linux emulation or even compiled from source.
Well that’s all I found for hexedit-ing, I’ll be happy to hear if someone can give me some feedback on his favourite editor.

How to test if USB Camera is working with Cheese on GNU / Linux

Friday, December 23rd, 2011

I just bought an USB Camera (my notebook doesn't include an embedded camera). The camera is some infamous brand chineese name Eilondo
and on the camera all that is written is SUPER USB2.0 1.3 mega pixel

I bought exactly this camera because I was said by the shop reseller that the camera works without any driver installations on Windows XP and Windows Vista

On my Debian Squeeze GNU / Linux it was detected in dmesg without any troubles, here is how the camera got detected in my kernel log :

debian:~# dmesg |tail -n 10
[25385.734932] usb 2-1: USB disconnect, address 4
[25388.905049] usb 2-1: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 5
[25389.050753] usb 2-1: New USB device found, idVendor=1e4e, idProduct=0102
[25389.050757] usb 2-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=0
[25389.050760] usb 2-1: Product: USB2.0 Camera
[25389.050762] usb 2-1: Manufacturer: Etron Technology, Inc.
[25389.050936] usb 2-1: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
[25389.056056] uvcvideo: Found UVC 1.00 device USB2.0 Camera (1e4e:0102)
[25389.058242] uvcvideo: UVC non compliance - GET_DEF(PROBE) not supported. Enabling workaround.
[25389.059113] input: USB2.0 Camera as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.7/usb2/2-1/2-1:1.0/input/input26

I was troubled by the message uvcvideo: UVC non compliance – GET_DEF(PROBE) not supported. Enabling workaround. , and hence looked for an application to test if the camera can recored properly.

While checking in packages available in Software Center , I found a plenty of programs under the search keyword Camera
I however decided to test it using just one application Cheese A tool to take pictures and videos from your webcam which I've seen to be quite popular among Liunx users.
Cheese is part of GNOME Desktop, so that was another reason I decided to give it a try. I was pleasently surprised about how good these tiny but functional proggie is.

To run Cheese in GNOME I nagivated to the menus:

Applications -> Sound & Video -> Cheese Webcam Booth

Just in case if Cheese is not installed, installing it with apt:

debian:~# apt-get install cheese

Cheese has capabilities to take pictures, a consequential photos take up, as well as create Video movies.

Cheese take camera testing tool Debian GNU Linux

The program has support to apply 12 Effects / (Masks) to add some fun to the pictures or video snapshots.

Test Video Camera on Debian Linux Cheese Effects

Probably the best thing about Cheese is its simplistic interface, which for me personally is a main criterion to evaluate a program quality ;).

Using rsync to copy / synchronize files or backups between Linux / BSD / Unix servers

Monday, November 21st, 2011

Rsync and Rsync over ssh logo picture

Many of us have already taken advantage of the powerful Rsync proggie, however I'm quite sure there are still people who never used rsync to transfer files between servers.. That's why I came with this small post to possibly introduce rsync to my blog readers.
Why Rsync and not Scp or SFTP? Well Rsync is designed from the start for large files transfer and optimized to do the file copying job really efficient. Some tests with scp against rsync will clearly show rsync's superiority.
Rsync is also handy to contiue copying of half copied files or backups and thus in many cases saves bandwidth and machine hdd i/o operations.

The most simple way to use rsync is:

server:~# rsync -avz -e ssh remoteuser@remotehost:/remote/directory /local/directory/

Where remoteuser@remotehost — is the the username and hostname of remote server to copy files to.
/remote/directory — is the directory where the rsync copied files should be stored
/local/directory — is the local directory from which files will be copied to remote directory

If not a preliminary passwordless ssh key (RSA / DSA) authentication is configured on remote server, the above command will prompt for a password otherwise the rsync will start doing the transfer.

If one needs to have a RSA or DSA (public / private key) passwordless SSH key authentication , a RSA key first should be generated and copied over to the remote server, like so:

server:~# ssh-keygen -t dsa
...
server:~# ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub root@remotehost
...

That's all folks, enjoy rsyncing 😉